The Free Speech Show is a comedy/talk format program hosted by Bill Bronner. Each show focuses on a specific topic. Comedians take turns delivering a monologue on the topic followed by a panel discussion.

2013-02-21

I am thrilled to little pieces to be able to share The Danish Poet with you. Created in a 2006 this animated short film was written, directed, and animated by Torill Kove and narrated by Liv Ullmann.

This delightful animated film focuses on Kasper Jørgensen a sad and lonely Danish poet in the 1940s. His psychiatrist suggests that he travels on the ferry from Copenhagen to Norway to meet his favorite author, Sigrid Undset.

He agrees but gets waylaid by the Norwegian weather and takes refuge at a farm where he meets Ingeborg, the farmer’s daughter.

The two fall in love but fate gets in the way. How Kasper and Ingeborg finally get together is something, I think, for you to discover for yourself but (without spoiling any surprise) it is more than their own fates that are at stake here.

The Danish Poet is a co-production of the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and Mikrofilm ASof Norway, it has won both the Academy Award (the Oscar!) and Genie Award for best animated short film in 2006.Is it possible to trace the chain of events that led to our own birth? Is our existence just coincidence? Do little things matter? In The Danish Poet the narrator ponders these question as we embark on a holiday to Norway with Kaspar, a poet whose creative well has run dry.

The Danish Poet received the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2007!

2013-02-15

Forget that it opens with a sweet story about getting an "I Love You" text from the Wife; it doesn't take long for 'My Weakness Is Strong' to get to one of those great, gross, and strange Patton Oswalt lines, which in this case is ".. Bring forth my doom spawn from your stink crevice and prove the Gypsy wrong!"

2013-02-14

This old early song by me -Jim- illustrates how bad i felt...when...im not sure 2005 or 06 perhaps. I did mean the words -if you are able to understand the harsch vocals- literally...I had this feeling that soon i was gone out of all now livings active memory and...then what...nothing of course, and it wasnt so. But what you hear was true then..today i more and more see myself as one of the lucky ones...not sure how...anyways....phuuiiuuu that isolation isnt cramming me now....=D JimB

he film is presented in a nonlinear narrative, jumping back and forth between McCandless's time spent in Alaskan wilderness and his two-year travels leading up to his journey to Alaska. The plot summary here is told in a more chronological order.

In May 1992, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) arrives in a remote area just north of the Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska and sets up a campsite in an abandoned bus. At first, McCandless is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature around him, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts wild animals with a .22 caliber rifle, reads books, and keeps a diary of his thoughts as he prepares for himself a new life in the wild.

Two years earlier in May 1990, McCandless graduated with high honors from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly afterwards, McCandless rejects his conventional life by destroying all of his credit cards and identification documents. He donates nearly all of his entire savings of $24,000 to Oxfam and sets out on a cross-country drive in his well-used, but reliable Datsun to experience life in the wilderness. However, McCandless does not tell his parents Walt (William Hurt) and Billie McCandless (Marcia Gay Harden) nor his sister Carine (Jena Malone) what he is doing or where he is going, and refuses to keep in touch with them after his departure, leaving them to become increasingly anxious and eventually desperate.

At Lake Mead, Arizona, McCandless' car is caught in a flash flood causing him to abandon it and begin hitchhiking instead. He burns what remains of his dwindling cash supply and assumes a new name: "Alexander Supertramp." In Northern California, McCandless encounters a hippie couple named Jan Burres (Catherine Keener) and Rainey (Brian H. Dierker). Rainey tells McCandless about his failing relationship with Jan, which McCandless would rekindle. By September, McCandless stops in Carthage, South Dakota to work for a contract harvesting company owned by Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn), but he is forced to leave after Westerberg is arrested for satellite piracy.

McCandless then travels to the Colorado River and, though told by park rangers that he may not kayak down the river without a license, ignores their warnings and paddles downriver until he eventually arrives in Mexico. There, his kayak is lost in a dust storm and he crosses back into the United States on foot. Unable to hitchhike, he starts traveling on freight trains to Los Angeles, California. Not long after arriving, however, he starts feeling "corrupted" by modern civilization and decides to leave. Later, McCandless is forced to switch his traveling method back to hitchhiking after he is beaten by the railroad police.

In December 1991, McCandless arrives at Slab City in the Imperial Valley region of California, and encounters Jan and Rainey again. There, he meets Tracy Tatro (Kristen Stewart), a teenage girl who shows interest in McCandless, but he rejects her because she is underage. After the holidays, McCandless decides to continue heading for Alaska, much to everyone's sadness. While camping near Salton City, California, McCandless encounters Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook), a retired man who recounts the story of the loss of his family in a car accident while he was serving in the United States Army. He now occupies his time in a workshop as an amateur leather worker. Franz teaches McCandless the craft of leatherwork, resulting in the making of a belt that details McCandless' travels. After spending several months with Franz, McCandless decides to leave for Alaska despite this upsetting Franz, who has become quite close to McCandless. On a parting note, Franz gives McCandless his old camping and travel gear along with the offer to adopt him as his grandchild, but McCandless simply tells him that they should discuss this after he returns from Alaska; then departs.

Four months later at the abandoned bus, life for McCandless becomes harder and he becomes less discerning. As his supplies begin to run out, he realizes that nature is also harsh and uncaring. In the pain of realization, McCandless concludes that true happiness can only be found when shared with others and seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family. However, he finds that the stream he had crossed during the winter has become wide, deep, and violent due to the thaw, and he is unable to cross. Saddened, he returns to the bus, now as a prisoner who is no longer in control of his fate and can only hope for help from the outside. In a desperate act, McCandless is forced to gather and eat roots and plants, but he confuses similar plants and eats a poisonous one, thus as a result falls sick. Slowly dying, he continues to document his process of self-realization and accepts his fate, as he imagines his family for one last time. He writes a farewell to the world and crawls into his sleeping bag to die. Two weeks later, his body is found by moose hunters. Shortly afterwards, Carine returns her brother's ashes by airplane from Alaska to Virginia in her backpack.

A standout track from The Blow Up, a '78 live show released as an official release cassette on the ROIR label in the early '80s, followed by an unauthorized CD. Previously, vinyl LP & cassette bootlegs of the show had circulated. It's a recording of a March 20, 1978 Television show at the Long Island, NY club "My Father's Place".

Discography trivia: I've seen "The Blow Up" sometimes described as a compilation of songs from various '78 shows, but my impression of its origin's different. 'Cause, when The Blow Up first came out on cassette, I was sure (was I mistaken?) the whole tape was identical to a bootleg cassette I already had of one specific '78 show from My Father's Place club, except The Blow Up inexplicably left out the song "Poor Circulation" the bootleg tape included.

More trivia: A small section of the song never got recorded, as the audience member taping it had to change cassettes before the song ended. Can you hear where Tom's solo near the end stops abruptly, & then they're already into the last section of the song? It was more noticeable on cassette bootleg circulated in the late '70s, as a short, silent gap was left on the bootleg tape versions. By the time it was issued on The Blow Up, they'd edited it together tidily.

Feb. 2012 Update: For those interested in old/rare Television/Tom V. articles, here's a link to a file I uploaded of scans of approx. 60 articles/interviews (most contain interview content):http://www.4shared.com/zip/p6aGwLm6/T...I collected them between 1978 & 1990, & the articles date from '74 to '90. The Wonder fan site has an excellent articles collection (mostly text files), but many of my articles aren't yet available there. I finally got around to digitizing mine & making them available to other fans to download. Also, here's a link to a file of scans of my copy of book "The Night", a poetry book(let) by Tom Verlaine & Patti Smith, published 1976: http://www.4shared.com/zip/eM4vfO6L/T...

Swedish academic and Gapminder Foundation co-founder Hans Rosling says data doesn't always back up our conceptions about the world. In the video above, Rosling explains that our ideas about developed and developing countries largely reflect the reality of fifty years ago, rather than today.

The video, The River of Myth, was released to coincide with Bill Gates' annual letter, and shares its emphasis on the power of measuring to achieve progress.

Rosling begins by examining the huge gap between child mortality rates in developed and developing countries fifty years ago, in 1963. By 1990, many countries had made progress, while others, such as Ethiopia, had hardly moved. In the last decade, however, Ethiopia caught up significantly. Rosling says that the East African nation's rapid progress can be an example for the countries where child mortality rates are still crippling.

CDZA went to Europe having no real plan for creating experiments. As a result, all four experiments were inspired spontaneously by circumstances and surroundings in four cities along the trip: Paris, Berlin, Salzburg, and Prague. Which experiment do you like the most? Obviously #3 for us.

Special thanks to Leo Heubach and Peter Man Peterson for making the grand tour possible.

How do you teach the classics to students today? How do you get students thinking critically about how Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach are relevant to music today? These composers provide the building blocks of modern music, and are necessary knowledge to a well-rounded musical education, but how do you get students to pay attention to these long-deceased classical music masters?CDZA presents an innovative way to connect with students and teach them the classics.FOSTER MUSIC LITERACYAmerican educator Ernest Boyer said that "aesthetic literacy is as basic as linguistic literacy." How are your students to learn about the rhythm of language, and non-verbal expression without a mastery of the basic concepts of music composition?President Ronald Reagan said, "Civilizations are most often remembered for their art and thought." Giving students an entry point into eighteenth and nineteenth century music can interest them in the history of the music and study the society that produced it. Liberal arts education is unfortunately under threat with budget cutbacks across the U.S. But education in the arts is necessary to create a well-rounded person, foster intellectual development, and provide a cultural framework and aesthetic lens to appreciate great works of art. Furthermore, getting students interested in classical music through popular music today, can help drive interest and hopefully engage the next generation of great musicians to create their own work.TEACH THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MUSIC COMPOSITIONTeachers can use these entertaining exercises by CDZA as an entry point to teach their students the fundamentals of music. Why do the lyrics of a Katy Perry song work well with classical music? What underlying principles of music make this mashup happen? What underlying conventions of music composition allow two songs, written hundreds of years apart, come together as one?In these exercises, teachers can help their students evaluate the songs in terms of the following:- Timbre- Beat and tempo- Meter- Pitch and mode- Tonality- Melody- Texture and Harmony- Understand principles of concise writing through song lyricsAlthough many pop lyrics are dismissed as being overly simple, they show how one can convey emotions and ideas in the fewest words possible. Lyric writing is often quite difficult, and their brevity can help students better understand the writing process and how to pare down and edit words to crystallize an idea. Teachers can use these exercises to teach students writing fundamentals, such as how to communicate a single idea in a well-crafted and direct sentence.These are just some examples of how the music discipline provides skills that transfer beyond listening to and playing music, and transfer to study, cognition, and communication skills. Can you identify more ways that these exercises create transferrable skills for students?- Dr. Matt WernerPhilosopher Emeritus at CDZA UniversityDepartment of Musical Pedagogyhttp://www.mattswriting.comStarring Alyssa Lower and Aiden MedinaMusic: Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik meets LMFAO's Party RockOffenbach's "Can Can" meets Gaga's Bad RomanceBeethoven's Fur Elise meets Adel's Rolling in the DeepGrieg's Peer Gynt Overture meets Carly Rae Jepson's Call Me MaybeBeethoven's Fifth Symphony meets Katy Perry's "Wide Awake"Tchaikovsky's Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy meets One Direction's What Makes You BeautifulHaydn's Surprise Symphony meets Justin Bieber's BabyJohn William's Jurassic Park Theme meets Psy's Gangnam StyleFilmed on: August 3rd, 2012Location: Terminus Recording Studios, NYC (http://www.terminusnyc.com)

CDZA co-founder Joe Sabia shows us what happens when we translate the lyrics of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through every language in Google Translate (64 times), and then taking what remains and translating it BACK into English.

Featuring Jeremie Harris as Will Smith.

Technically speaking, all but the first verse were translated. The lyrics were translated from English to the world's most spoken language (Mandarin), to the second most (Spanish), to the third most, to the fourth most, ETC, putting all 64 languages in order by finding the demographic population size on every language on Wikipedia.

Fun facts: The last translation we put it through was "Esperanto", because apparently, only 10,000 people speak it.No one has an official language of "Latin", but we had to assume a lot of people are still able to speak it. So that was a bit ambiguous. Proper Nouns never really changed. Neither did numbers, as you can tell in the last stanza, "7,8".We have no idea why we did this.